Kleptocracy Daily: May 16, 2017

DETAILS

Investigators looking into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia will be able to pursue leads by tapping into a huge database of suspicious financial transactions maintained by FinCEN.

President Trump revealed highly classified information to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador in a White House meeting last week, according to current and former U.S. officials, who said Trump’s disclosures jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on the Islamic State. Trump confirmed this allegation this morning via Twitter.

In an investigation of PrivatBank, Ukraine’s largest bank, recently owned by oligarchs Ihor Kolomoiskiy and Gennadiy Bogolyubov, RFE/RL’s anti-corruption programSchemes found that just prior to being nationalized in December 2016, the bank made loans amounting to approximately $4.16 billion to companies that exist only on paper. (in Ukrainian)